A conversation with Professor Pamela Snow on what is at stake when teaching ignores the research, and what it costs students.
Key takeaways
- Evidence-based instruction reflects how novice learners build knowledge and skills in sequence. Understanding that sequence is one of the most practical things a school can do for its students.
- When foundational learning has gaps, those gaps compound over time. Snow calls this the “Swiss cheese” phenomenon, and addressing it early produces stronger outcomes than trying to remediate later.
- Much of the current momentum toward evidence-informed practice is coming from teachers themselves, often in their own time. That ground-up energy is proving to be a genuine driver of change.
- School leaders do not need to wait for system-wide reform to make progress. Visiting schools already further along the change journey is proving to be one of the most effective starting points.
- Selecting technology tools in response to a clearly defined learning problem, rather than the other way around, puts schools in a much stronger position to see real impact.
There is a widely held perception that evidence-based instruction represents a conservative shift: a return to rote learning, rows of desks, and teacher-led transmission at the expense of student agency. Professor Pamela Snow, University Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Psychology at La Trobe University and co-director of the Science of Language and Reading Lab (SOLAR), does not share that perception.
Her position is not that structured, explicit teaching is more traditional. It is that it is better supported by evidence. The research on how novice learners build knowledge sequentially, particularly in literacy and numeracy, has existed for decades. The question she keeps returning to is why so little of it has made it into classrooms.
“Forward to fundamentals,” a phrase Snow uses throughout this episode, is not a call to the past. Rather, it’s an argument that the complexity of what we ask learners to master has been consistently underestimated by adults who have long since automated those same skills. As Snow puts it during the conversation: just because something looks basic to us does not mean it is basic to a novice.
The Swiss Cheese Problem
Snow describes what happens when foundational learning has gaps using an image that will be familiar to many school leaders: Swiss cheese. Students who move through the curriculum without having secured foundational skills carry those gaps with them, and the gaps compound. A student who has not grasped fractions is not well placed to learn algebra. A student who leaves the first three years of school without becoming a fluent reader is, in Snow’s assessment, “very often on struggle street for the rest of their schooling and the rest of their lives.”
This is not, she is careful to note, primarily a question of student capacity, but a question of instructional design.
Snow’s own path into this field began in speech pathology and public health. Working with young people in the youth justice system, she encountered a consistent pattern: hidden language disorders masked by behavioural issues, and educational histories shaped by early detachment from school. All of them had attended school. All of them had teachers. The question that has driven her work ever since is why those years of schooling did not produce the literacy outcomes that could have changed their trajectories.
“Why aren’t we teaching them to read? That’s a universal public health intervention. It’s kind of like a form of vaccination. Why are we not vaccinating everybody?” — Professor Pamela Snow
The Accountability Gap
Part of Snow’s answer lies in a structural difference between education and other professions. In health, practitioners work within systems that test interventions before implementing them at scale, maintain accountability through regulatory bodies, and update practice when the evidence shifts. In education, no equivalent structure exists.
“We have accountability in other professions that really just hasn’t existed in education,” she says. “In other professions, when errors occur, there’s a high level of accountability. There are regulatory bodies.”
That absence has allowed approaches with weak or contested evidence bases to persist far longer than they would in medicine, engineering or aviation. It has also created conditions where technology adoption in schools has followed the same pattern: tools selected because they are new and appealing, embedded in practice before anyone has asked whether they produce durable improvements in learning.
“I think the use of technology in schools got ahead of itself. When we see something bright and shiny and new, we just buy it and see how it goes, and then it becomes embedded as part of practice.”
She raises the same concern about AI. Not because the technology lacks potential, but because the pattern is recognisable from earlier rounds of adoption in education: practice runs ahead of evidence, and schools are left managing consequences that were, in retrospect, foreseeable.
Where the Change Is Actually Coming From
Despite these systemic challenges, Snow points to genuine and growing momentum. A significant part of it, she notes, is coming not from policy reform or changes to teacher training, but from teachers themselves.
“A lot of that energy and impetus is coming from teachers. It’s coming from the ground up.”
She describes teachers attending ResearchED conferences on Saturdays in their own time, completing online short courses (La Trobe’s own courses have been completed by close to 13,000 educators), and building communities of practice through shared professional networks. That ground-up energy is outpacing reform in faculties of education, where change is occurring “very slowly” and, in some cases, amounts to what Snow describes as “window dressing” in response to external pressure.
“You can’t have high variability and high quality; you’ve got to choose one.” — Professor Pamela Snow
It is a point that carries particular weight for school leaders thinking about consistency of instructional practice across departments and year levels, and about what it means to offer every student, regardless of which classroom they happen to be placed in, access to the same quality of teaching.
For school leaders looking to support their staff through this shift, Snow’s practical recommendation is direct: go and see it in action. Research evidence is one thing, she says, but what makes the shift real for teachers is visiting a school where high-quality explicit instruction is already happening and observing it in practice.
“Sometimes the first time teachers see that, they come out with their heads spinning, because they’ve literally never seen anything like it. But I think that can be quite transformational.”
She recommends visiting schools with comparable demographic profiles, so that the “it wouldn’t work here” response is harder to sustain. The question, in her view, is not whether evidence-based instruction works in certain contexts, but what evidence would be needed to argue that the brains of students in one school learn fundamentally differently from those in another.
What School Leaders Should Hold Onto
Snow’s closing point in the episode returns to what she sees as the central challenge: creating a genuine shared understanding of what evidence is and what it requires, before the debate moves to tools and approaches.
“I’d like to move beyond the rhetoric and the unanswerable questions to a space where we’re debating how we best use and value students’ instructional time, which ethically belongs to students.” — Professor Pamela Snow
For school leaders, that framing is worth sitting with. Instructional time is not a neutral resource to be allocated according to habit or convention. It belongs to students. And the evidence that some approaches use it more effectively than others has been available for a long time.
Throughout this episode, the central question is less about whether the evidence exists, and more about what schools choose to do with it.
Hear the full conversation:
This article draws on Episode 02 of Well-MeasurED, Education Perfect’s interview series exploring what genuinely works in education and EdTech with industry leaders and researchers.
Watch or listen to Dr Jill McGuire and James Santure’s conversation with Professor Pamela Snow, “The Evidence We Ignored: Not Back to Basics, Forward to Fundamentals“, to hear the research in her own words.
